To Whom It May Concern

Military Relations (Part II)

I understand that Iraq, while dangerous, was not nearly as perilous as facing the German army and air force in WWII. Foster’s descriptive details of the battlefield and combat were very interesting to me. The enemy we face in Iraq is not nearly so organized, no where near the sheer numbers or support such as the Germans of WWII. What the soldiers faced back then on a daily basis was just unbelievable.

I was impressed by Foster’s ability to remember the names of people he knew from some 60 years ago. I don’t remember the mess sergeant’s name from just 10 years ago in Nebraska City. These days our food is prepared by civilian contractors, where as in WWII they had to survive often on “K” and “C” rations, neither of which sound all that great by comparison. We have MREs, Meals Ready To Eat, but we rarely ever eat them, because our chow halls have pretty good food. In WWII they were not afforded such luxuries, instead eating whatever rations they had, supplemented at times by “local cuisine.”

In December of 1944, the Seventh Army was heavily involved in the Battle of the Bulge, one of the most historic and important battles of WWII. Now, it gets incredibly hot here in Iraq, exceeding 130 degrees at times. But I would take the blistering heat any day over the bitter chill endured by the troops during the 1944 winter in Europe. January 1944 turned out to be perhaps the most important and difficult month for Foster’s battalion, as the artillery batteries fired more than 27,000 rounds of ammunition that month alone. The units were constantly repositioning to meet any enemy threat the Germans could muster.

Here in Iraq, we continue to modify our operating procedures to try and maintain better relations with the Iraqi people. We do not consider the typical Iraqi citizen to be our enemy, therefore we try to avoid warning shots, maintain a less aggressive show of force, and drive along with traffic rather than forcing them to the side of the road when we drive by. It’s important to maintain security, but to also put forth a friendly posture, because most of the insurgent activity is not done by Iraqi citizens, but by foreign fighters trying to destabilize the Iraqi government.

These foreign insurgents are killing innocent Iraqis as well as American soldiers, therefore by working with the Iraqi people, we can develop a trusting relationship in order to squash the insurgency. We have yet to suffer any injuries or deaths from combat. While our training, tactics and NCO leadership is a huge part of that, we’ve also been very lucky. We hope this continues. Few units if any were so lucky during WWII. This is what happens with “force on force” combat, something we don’t see in Iraq.

We wear our individual ballistic armor and other protective gear whenever we are out on the road, and during high threat times “inside the wire” on post, but we don’t face bullets wizzing over our heads on continual basis. Hearing that, along with artillery landing nearby, and enemy planes flying overhead, I don’t know if a soldier in WWII would ever get fully used to that. Then came the enemy jet, the ME 262, the first jet fighter plane. This must have been amazing to the allied troops in Europe, having never seen anything like it before. I wonder how Foster and the other men reacted upon first seeing them, it must have been awe inspiring, even as deadly as they were.

On Easter Sunday, 2006, I was barely able to walk, the effects of having run a marathon the day before. On Easter Sunday 1944, Foster’s unit was crossing the Rhine River in Germany. At this point, the allied forces were pushing the Germans back faster than ever. Enemy prisoners of war were adding up, and they continued to advance into Germany, stopping periodically whenever encountering resistance, to do fire missions.

06 April 1944: One battery supporting the 19th Armored Infantry helped liberate a POW camp, many of the prisoners having escaped earlier came out of the woods, crying as the allied troops rescued them. I cannot imagine what that would be like, such a wash of emotion it must have been to liberate your fellow troops, even if they were soldiers you had never met before.

05 May 1944: Victory Europe!!! How incredible this must have been, after years of fighting, not knowing how it might end, things looking bleak at times, advancing on the enemy deep in Europe, and suddenly, it’s all over with. From his recollections, it sounds as if Foster got to see quite a bit of Germany following VE day. He got a good look at the German ME 262 fighter jet and had the same conclusion I did about the plane, that it would have been more effective earlier in the war when they would have been able to build more of them and keep them up with parts and supplies.

Foster noted the incredible damage in Munich, Germany, with entire city blocks laid out completely in rubble. Some 50,000 people were killed during air raids in the city. This illustrates the major difference in the weapons when compared to the weapons we have now. I have toured many of the concrete bunkers here in Tallil, built by Saddam Hussein during the Iran/Iraq war of the 1980’s. In several of the bunkers, you could find rooms in the basement that had rebar and huge piles of cement as though they had just fallen away from the ceiling for no reason.

I asked one of the Iraqi contractors about this, an English educated engineer who actually helped with the design and construction of many of the bunkers back then. He laughed when I questioned the quality of the construction of the bunkers. He pointed out that it was the United State Air Force’s precision bombing that gave the bunkers an outward appearance of being unscathed, yet decimated specific areas inside the bunkers. This was during the first gulf war, and it’s an amazing testament to how advance our weapons systems are nowadays. There would have been no way to get this kind of precision during WWII without collateral damage and civilian deaths. But now, you can take out a building next door to a library or church without worrying about destroying them. You can never completely eliminate civilian casualties during war, but it’s important to do what you can to reduce that number.

From what he wrote, Foster and his unit did see a lot of Germany. It’s interesting how he took notice of the many historical areas, where Hitler was nearly killed, where the Nazi party was started, among the more interesting sites. Here in Iraq I have seen a multitude of historically significant places. I remember walking on the Temple of Ur, thinking to myself that I was standing on a building more than 5000 years old, the most significant building of it’s time and the largest in the world by far in it’s time. The house of Abraham is another one, it was incredible to be walking around on the same floor stones as a man so synonymous with the histories of every monotheistic religion on the planet. I was utterly in awe. There were also many of Saddam’s palaces, most of those are now being used to quarter high ranking officers of the United States military (yah, imagine THAT!)

In July of 1945, Foster’s unit began the long journey back home, heading first by train from Germany back to France to Camp Lucky Strike, a dusty collection of tents near Le Havre. He wrote about all of the towns he saw along the way, and also of the massive railroad gun, which I saw pictures of in those Time Life WWII books. Undeveloped film was not allowed to be taken back to the USA, so Foster spent several late nights developing his film into photographs by hand in a tray.

It’s interesting that now during this digital age, everyone seems to have a camera that can transmit images simply by connecting it to a computer. This also contributes to some major problems, as seen by the images of the Abu Graihb prison and other photos of behavior that should not have been going on. In the days of WWII, photography wasn’t nearly so easy to do, which may have been a good thing, considering. I would like to see Foster’s photo collection, perhaps the next time belly and I are in Wisconsin. I believe it would be very interesting.

On July 25, 1945, Foster left France for the United States on luxury liner that had been refitted as a troop carrier. He arrived in New York on August 2, and was promptly given 30 days leave. He boarded a train for Wisconsin and was given orders to report to Camp Cooke, California, at the end of his leave. There preparations were being made for a landing in Japan in the Pacific, where the war still raged on.

Of course, because of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that never happened. On August 14, 1945, Japan surrendered, and WWII was finally over. Foster still boarded a train for Camp Cooke, and over the next six months got into a stateside Army routine. He was able to visit a lot of different places on the west coast on his weekends off, and on February 6, 1946, he was honorably discharged from service in the United States Army.

We likely have about 4 months left here in Iraq, and when we get back stateside, we’ll have about a week to 10 days of demobilization. This will consist of accountability of equipment, security classes, sensitivity training, counseling, and awards ceremonies. While I will not have 6 months of active duty to do upon arriving back in the states, I’ll have about 3 years left to reach 20 years of service, at which point I may retire if I choose to do so. Of course belly will have 2 years left in the Marine Corps at that time, so we’ll just have to see where things take us.

I have the utmost respect for the service members who fought in World War II. I have a hard time comparing what I am doing now to what those brave men did some 60 years ago. At present, there is little hope for unorganized radicals to defeat our military thru the use of sporadic cowardly bombings. But during WWII, there were times when it really appeared Germany and Japan might win the war, and even as isolated geographically as the United States was, the strike at Pearl Harbor was a wake up call, that we as a nation could not sit idly by and isolate ourselves from the problems of the world. We were a part of that world. What are we when good men do nothing in the face of tyranny?

The history of World War II, what led up to it, the actual battles, the aftermath, should all be a mandatory class for all American high school students. I fear that many do not understand the incredible sacrifices made by our armed forces during WWII, how those sacrifices protected the very freedoms we enjoy today. The media no longer promotes heros, instead focusing on vilifying the military with every chance they get. Although good stories outnumber the bad in Iraq 1000 to 1, all you hear on the news is about the negative situations that happen on a rare basis.

By studying WWII, our youth will not only get a better understanding of the war and our world in general, but also it will help us to keep from repeating history, by recognizing the need for a strong military to preserve our very way of life.

I’m incredibly proud of my wife’s grandfather, he is a hero, as were all the soldiers, airmen, marines, and seamen during WWII, and all other armed conflicts our country has endured. They certainly should always be remembered as such.